Scouting only half the field

[itsjustjon]

If you focus on one half of the field, I'm sure you could potentially see all of the robots that are at your competition, but the benefit of scouting all six robots is seeing how alliance members on one side respond to the actions of alliance members on the other side.

Plus, scouting one side might mean you only get to see a robot once throughout a competition, and that's it. Then, you might judge that robot based on their performance in only one match. It helps to get as much data as possible.

Maybe you could scout one side of the field throughout the day and have a camera filming all of the matches on the other side of the field.

[tindleroot]

Originally Posted by itsjustjon

Plus, scouting one side might mean you only get to see a robot once throughout a competition, and that's it.

While that is technically possible, it is extremely unlikely that you will not see about half of a team's matches if you only looked at one alliance. This is because the final step of the matchmaking algorithm is to swap the alliances' colors in matches in order to balance the number of red and blue matches for each team.

Scouting only half the teams in a match will have the negative consequence of having half of a sample size, though with limited scouting this is inevitable. However, you should expect data to be skewed if you scout one color only since the two sides of the field will usually have small flaws. This means that, for example, a shooting robot might play less than average on the blue side due to a defect in the goal sizes. However, other types of robots will not suffer the same issues, and you will have skewed data. You should not scout a particular alliance for that reason.

[smclean1969]

I recommend you think about why you're scouting in the first place and then set up your scouting strategy around your objectives. You say you've never made it to the elimination rounds, so that seems like a pretty good goal to start with. That means you really want to have a solid enough robot that one of the alliances pick you as a partner--sorry for the assumption that if you haven't made it to the eliminations that you won't be an alliance captain. As an alliance captain it's a completely different approach.

So, use your scouting to improve your alliance performance during the matches. One way you could do this would be to look at your team's upcoming matches and figure out who your alliance partners are. Then watch and write down their performance to determine what they're good at. More importantly, it's key for your team to know what you're good at and be honest and realistic about it. It really hurts a team's credibility if they say "we can shoot 90% in the top goal" and then they maybe get a single shot in the top goal.

Use the scouting to build your team strategy--who's going after the defenses, who's shooting, is it realistic to collect the extra ranking points, etc.... Most of all--have fun and be a good alliance partner.

Best of luck.
Scott

[logank013]

Feel free to PM me what your scouting sheet looks like. I can send you a link to what our sheet is for Cyber Blue this year. Something that we find is that we collect a lot of data and only use a little bit. If you "dumb" down your data sheet and make it only consist of a few categories, it would be pretty simple to have 1 person scout 2 robots at once. Then you could cover both alliances with little problems. Last year, I was able to scout all 6 robots at once with my version of the "dumb"ed down version of our scouting sheet. Of course, last year it was a simple game to scout but even this year, scouting with a simplified sheet won't make scouting super complicated.

For your 3 scout team, I'd suggest doing quantitative data (numbers) for most of the matches. Then as the day goes on, do a little bit of qualitative data (descriptions). Note what defenses teams can cross and stuff like that. Even though you may not be an alliance captain, I find scouting fun and it's good practice for if your alliance does become an alliance captain at an event. Like i said, feel free to send me a message, and I can show you how we scout and how it could be simplified to a 3 member scout team.